Scientists must develop new tools to help ordinary people understand their work on global climate change, and to help them appreciate what the existing scientific models can and can't predict about this phenomenon. This was the message from climate change expert Professor Bruce Hewitson, of UCT's Climate Systems Analysis Group, during the keynote lecture of Tuesday's session of the week-long "Iphakade: Climate Changes & African Earth Systems - Past, Present and Future" conference, which began on Monday.
Scientists must develop new tools to help ordinary people understand their work on global climate change, and to help them appreciate what the existing scientific models can and can't predict about this phenomenon.
This was the message from climate change expert Professor Bruce Hewitson, of UCT's Climate Systems Analysis Group, during the keynote lecture of Tuesday's session of the week-long "Iphakade: Climate Changes & African Earth Systems - Past, Present and Future" conference, which began on Monday.
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Hewitson is one of the authors of the influential reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the body set up in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organisation and the UN Environment Programme to evaluate the risk of climate change caused by human activity.Â
The IPCC shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former vice-president of the US, Al Gore.
Hewitson said there had been an "incredible acceleration" of the need for relevant information about climate change, particularly at the regional level.
"It's been quite startling - there's a huge hunger for information, also in Africa."
Although the global, large-scale, climate change models were giving good results, when these were downscaled to the regional and local level their predictions were not yet sufficiently accurate to meet specific local sector needs.Â
"There's an inappropriate anticipation of what we can do," he said.
Weather events were relevant to ordinary people "on the ground" who wanted immediate information, and the barrier between them and scientists had to be broken, Hewitson said.
"There is an imperative for the immediate and the desire for scientific robustness - we need to balance those."
Even among scientists themselves there were sometimes miscommunications, and at one IPCC meeting there had been a two-hour debate about the most appropriate adjective to use between "likely" and "unlikely", he pointed out - "all the options offered could be misconstrued".
While the word "uncertainty" had a specific scientific meaning that was immediately understood by scientists, lay people usually took this to mean that the scientists simply didn't know about something, which wasn't the case.
Scientists had to create appropriate and accessible data boards to link science and society, and they also had to create appropriate climate change tools that ordinary people could understand.
"One of our biggest challenges is, how do we communicate? The misunderstanding is tremendous," Hewitson said.
This article was originally published on page 7 of Cape Argus on January 14, 2009
